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Moosavi Tayebi et al. develop a deep learning-based computational pathology tool for automated bone marrow cytology from whole slide images. Their approach generates a histogram of cell types present within the bone marrow aspirate to aid in diagnostic haematopathology.

Abstract The artificial intelligence revolution has been spurred forward by the availability of large-scale datasets. In contrast, the paucity of large-scale medical datasets hinders the application of machine learning in healthcare. The lack of publicly available multi-centric and diverse datasets mainly stems from confidentiality and privacy concerns around sharing medical data. To demonstrate a feasible path forward in medical image imaging, we conduct a case study of applying a differentially private federated learning framework for analysis of histopathology images, the largest and perhaps most complex medical images. We study the effects of IID and non-IID distributions along with the number of healthcare providers, i.e., hospitals and clinics, and the individual dataset sizes, using The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) dataset, a public repository, to simulate a distributed environment. We empirically compare the performance of private, distributed training to conventional training and demonstrate that distributed training can achieve similar performance with strong privacy guarantees. We also study the effect of different source domains for histopathology images by evaluating the performance using external validation. Our work indicates that differentially private federated learning is a viable and reliable framework for the collaborative development of machine learning models in medical image analysis.

Histopathology images exhibit considerable variability, which can make diagnosis prone to uncertainty and errors. Using retrieval systems to locate similar images when a query image is given can assist pathologists in making more reliable decisions when diagnosing, based on accurately diagnosed past cases. Local binary patterns (LBP) have been successfully used as image descriptors for different applications. However, using LBP on histopathology images is still under investigation from different perspectives. The immense texture variability of these images and the lack of labeled training data are among the challenges that must be addressed. In this paper, we propose a new extension of LBP that is explicitly aware of the heterogeneity of local texture patterns through heterogeneity-based weighting. We use both homogeneity and the second moment (variance) of local neighborhoods to extend LBP histograms with heterogeneity information so that they better capture the polymorphism in histopathology images. We applied all concepts at multiple scales and investigated the extensions through both separated and concatenated extended histograms. We applied the proposed method on three publicly available datasets, namely, KimiaPath24, invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC), and BreakHis. The experimental results revealed that our features could retrieve and classify images with the highest accuracy. For KimiaPath24, we achieved 96.4% surpassing both LBP (91.0%) and deep features from VGG network (79.5%). For IDC, we reached the highest F1 measure (0.7665). Only for BreakHis, the proposed method was slightly less accurate than a customized convolutional neural network with rule fusion.